“... its particles entangled over vast stretches of space. And vast stretches of time. A generation born in the 1930s can easily have living grandchildren who might survive to see the 22nd century. That’s 170 years; and the grown-up children in The Corrections find themselves, as so many do, smack in the centre of this temporal expanse, approaching middle age ...”

“... that still roils. Lish’s pedagogical manner, however, was the opposite of his surgical style. A born showman and provocateur, he presided over workshops and private master-classes that lasted for hours, often with limited bathroom breaks. It wasn’t the practical advice and forked-lightning insights that made the tuition fees and bladder discomfort worth ...”

“... human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in 1916, when Bishop was five, her mother was committed to a sanitorium in Nova Scotia, dying there in 1934, the year Bishop graduated from Vassar. Bishop was ...”

“... above all Alfonso Chacón, Pompeo Ugonio, the Fleming Philips van Winghe and the Maltese-born Antonio Bosio – set out to study the catacombs systematically. It was a huge and inaccessible site: there are sixty separate catacombs, though only thirty or so were known before recent times. They comprised a vast and wildly complex network of passages ...”

“... one with ‘no contact with the real world at all’, as Frank O’Connor disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the time imagining a kind of writing that ...”

“... said that our characters are made by the ten years immediately preceding our birth. The poet was born in 1564; five years earlier, in 1559, the Act of Uniformity was passed (though only barely, by three votes). The previous half-century was not strong in uniformity. Major historical studies of the Reformation period, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the ...”

“... of a creature, battling and winning through against the forces of darkness, like Jane Eyre, like Anne of Green Gables, like Elizabeth I. Read Oranges now and you will still find in it the exuberance and the craft of a jack-in-the-box. There is so much energy stowed away in those neat, demure little sentences. It will leap out and cuff you hard. You can feel ...”

“... and my fortress’. He has a ‘people aborning’ (22) where the KJ has a ‘people that shall be born’, and a ‘sojourner’ (94) for the KJ’s ‘stranger’. The KJ’s ‘I have considered the days of old’ (77) is now ‘I ponder the days of yore.’ And the famous line ‘I have been young and now am old’ (37) has been turned into ...”

“... will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes. It is a long time now since triumphalist Protestantism held sway, either in academic or popular belief. Among ...”

“... dates: the Mona Lisa, another female portrait, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his ...”

“... February 2024, an exhibition about her life and work opened in Vienna, the city in which she was born. Segal’s final story appeared in the New Yorker on 7 October, the day that she died, aged 96. Her daughter and her son’s partner had taken dictation.Those who know Segal’s work are familiar with the story of her childhood, what she called, with some ...”

“... Romantic, he was also repeatedly mocked for his arriviste pretensions (a bricklayer’s son, born John Soan, he added the more dignified final ‘e’ when he was setting up practice in the early 1780s), for his ludicrous irascibility (one of his standard responses to criticism was to issue a libel writ) and for the perversity of his architectural ...”

“... advisers and entrenched suspicion among people who doubt his resolve. By recognising Palestine, Anne Tuaillon, the disconsolate president of France-Palestine Solidarity, told the press, France could have sent a strong signal to Israel and the world. It would have been ‘a vital stage in the resolution of the conflict’, according to Salman el-Herfi, the ...”

“... East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the ...”

“... comparable to that of Shakespeare and Spinoza (though probably more as foil than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on being ...”